“He went on a little farther and bowed with His face to the ground, praying, ‘My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want Your will to be done, not mine.’” – Matthew 26:39
Yesterday, we discussed how Jesus knew what was coming before it ever came. But this does not mean Jesus was excited about what was to come. Jesus did not want to be crucified (obviously), so He appealed to His father.
That appeal is recorded in Matthew 26:39, “He went on a little farther and bowed with His face to the ground, praying, ‘My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want Your will to be done, not mine.’”
Maybe you are wondering: What “cup” was he referring to? That cup was THE CROSS! And do you know was in that cup? The sins of the whole world! Jesus knew that it was a brief time from Gethsemane to Golgotha, where the overwhelming weight of our sin would be pressed down upon Him with crushing force, bearing our guilt and shame on the cross.
The prophet Isaiah, 700 years before that night, described those coming hours in Isaiah 53:4-6, “Yet it was our weaknesses He carried; it was our sorrows that weighed Him down. And we thought His troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for His own sins! But He was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed. All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the LORD laid on Him the sins of us all.”
Jesus prayed, “My Father! if it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from Me.” In other words, “if there’s any other way, another cup, another method that would satisfy the claims of divine justice and make salvation possible for lost sinners, let’s take that other way.”
But according to God’s Word, there wasn’t. There was no other way. What Isaiah said came to be. It said the Lord laid on Him the sins of us all. Some translations say, “Yet the Lord was pleased to crush Him severely.” God not only allowed the cross to crush Jesus, but He ordered it because it was the only way. Aren’t you grateful that Jesus humbled Himself the way He did for our sake?